Crowds and Party · 第 45 页

Characterized by a perspective foreshadowed by Marxism Today’s debate over the new times, a left realism has congealed around a set of loosely held suspicions. This left realism may not be endorsed in its entirety by any particular political or theoretical tendency. No one that I know of has published an explicitly developed left realist position. Yet the fragmenting of left politics into an ever-expanding array of populist, liberal, progressive, trans, pluralist, green, multiculturalist, anti-racist, radical democratic, feminist, identitarian, anarchist, queer, autonomist, horizontalist, antiimperialist, insurrectionist, libertarian, socialist, and communist persuasions is symptomatic of such a realism, the premises of which manifest as suspicions time and again—in arguments among activists and academics, retorts at meetings, and rejoinders in social media. These premises are that collectivity is undesirable and that collectivity is impossible.

Collectivity is undesirable because it is suspected of excluding possibilities, effacing difference, and enforcing discipline.⁶⁷ “What do you mean ‘we’?” is one slogan of this suspicion, typically lobbed into contexts and discussions deemed insufficiently attentive to the specificities of each person’s experience. “Diversity of tactics” sometimes comes up as another such slogan, particularly when invoked to secure space for small-group confrontations with the police at the expense of broader political coordination.

Some find collectivity to be undesirable because of its opposition to individual responsibility and freedom. Rejecting the communisms of Badiou as well as Hardt and Negri, Vanessa Lemm warns, “In both these trends, the process of subjectivation tends to dissolve the individual into a ‘multitude’ or a ‘cause’ that is supra-individual and that, far from assuming responsibility for one’s freedom, demands that one surrender it.”⁶⁸ Lemm offers a Nietzschean “counterforce to the radical egalitarianism” of the communists, emphasizing how Nietzsche’s “aristocratic conception of culture” relies on “cultivating the responsibility of singular individuals.” Others position collectivity as undesirable by insinuating that collectivity has to be imposed; any collective employs a state logic. Banu Bargu’s bold deployment of Max Stirner’s egoist view of liberation as an individual project of self-valorization best exemplifies this view: to realize their own uniqueness and potential, egoists “should direct their efforts not only against the state, but against any collectivity and collective project.”⁶⁹

In the place of an undesirable collectivity, left realism offers up diversity, plurality, and multiplicity. To this end, Eugene W. Holland wants to create a “multiplicity of multiplicities.”⁷⁰ Jimmy Casas Klausen and James Martel likewise encourage expressions of human diversity and view thriving political and economic associations as those that are adaptable, contingent, and multiple.⁷¹ And Andrew Koch claims that anarchism is the “only justifiable political stance” because of its defense of the infinite pluralism of individuated meaning.⁷² Such views proceed as if such multiplicity were primarily ontological, rather than also stimulated by capitalism for its benefit and preservation.⁷³ They also underplay state interest in plurality, particularly the fragmentations that hinder collective opposition and the individuations that facilitate

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